CAPITAL CLOSE-UP

Zimbabwe
Family
Finds Home in CAP
M
Reprinted by permission of
the Argus (S.D.) Leader
By Nestor Ramos
2nd Lt. Mick Stanton gazed out the second floor window, watching snow
as fine as dust blow steadily across the airport runway.
It was getting late, and the sun was low, painting a landscape in two colors.
“That,” he said, “is not a picture of the African bush.”
In the seven years since he and his family arrived in Sioux Falls at the end
of a 36-hour airplane journey, Stanton has grown accustomed to looking out
the window and seeing a different world.
When Stanton and his family got on a plane in July 2000 in Zimbabwe,
the country where they’d spent their lives, they didn’t know for certain that
he was leaving for good. But the ugly situation there would only get worse.
Now Stanton is on the path toward becoming a U.S. citizen.
Stanton, his wife Patricia and their four children lived on the land
Stanton’s family settled on in the 1940s, when the country, then known as
Rhodesia and ruled by a white minority, was controlled as a colony by the
United Kingdom. In that climate Stanton, 43, grew up and watched as the
country transformed. In 1980, with the election of Robert Mugabe,
Zimbabwe became an independent nation.
In the 20 years between Mugabe’s rise to power and Stanton’s hasty exit,
things changed slowly but inexorably.
Civil Air Patrol Volunteer 32 May-June 2007